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Show HN: Turn an email to a web page
- tlogan 12y agoCan you add so that people can append their emails / attachments to the existing page? Even SMS messages? You can add twitter message to it latter on...
- stanmancan 12y agoThis is a neat idea. It would be cool to somehow allow you to add a list of recipients that should receive the link once it's pinned, but I guess that takes away from the simplicity of it.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoThat seems in line with the design more so than uploading css or js.
- hngiszmo 12y agolike if you receive a mail that was not only to p@mailp.in, you could send the generated link to those people in CC. I'm not sure what to use this for though. Who would look at the website when it just contains what was in the mail a minute ago anyway?
- scoj 12y agoI like the idea. I can't think of a specific use-case for me yet, but email integrated apps are often pretty cool and make for easier adoption.
- mailpin 12y agoWe (as developers of mailpin) use the services ourselves: 1. Ad hoc image album. Put a bunch of images as attachments in an email and send to p@mailp.in to create a simple page. 2. Forward company receipts to p@mailp.in and create a page, and share the link in coworkers ... (this sounds weird ... but it works well for us ...) 3. Forward marketing spams to create page, and publicly share such pages to denounce those spammers :) 4. Forward paper acceptance latters or other letters to create pages, and share them to show off -- vanity! 5. Ad hoc blogging ... Don't want to have an account, don't want people to follow me. But occasionally, we still want to say something and share to Friends that we really trust. 6. Create a playlist of youtube videos. Put a bunch of youtube links and send to p@mailp.in. A page with embedded videos will be created. We don't have youtube accounts ... sorry ... but still want to share a bunch of videos with friends ... 7. Tweet more than 140 characters. Create a page with short url, and tweet! There would be more use cases. The point is, we want something dead simple. No registration, no app (well, email client is still needed ...), and private.
- scoj 12y agoThanks for the update of what went through your minds. Keep track of how customers use it. You will likely be surprised by what actually is done with it.
- roryhughes 12y agoIt would be handy if you could attach a js or css file to the email which would be used in the published page.
- gnicholas 12y agoThis is an excellent idea—I've received many requests from people who want to be able to use the BeeLine Reader browser plugins to read their email. This would accomplish that goal. Even without a JS/CSS helper, this is still really awesome because people can use this tool in combination with our browser plugins. Please contact me (nick@BeeLineReader.com) if you end up allowing JS/CSS helpers so that we can work with you to make ours compatible. Thanks again for this awesome product!
- umurkontaci 12y agoI'm sorry, you have written a very similar message to the comments section of the given link. It smells spam.
- Kiro 12y agoWhat do you mean? Yes, he posted another message endorsing mailp.in in the comments and here he's reaching out for a collaboration. I don't see why it would be spam just because he's mentioning his product.
- tg3 12y agoIt seems primarily because his comments aren't adding significant value without mentioning his product. Take out the product, and it's basically "Awesome!". A low value comment + product mentions = spammy smell.
- umurkontaci 12y agoSeems like I am getting downvoted for some reason. Let me clarify a bit of things here. The product he is talking about is a browser plugin, which is something that claims that speeds up reading by coloring the sentences. This has no relation whatsoever with the OP's product. It is saying, "Hey great stuff! Check out my unrelated product in the link, maybe we can collaborate." I doesn't smell spam; it is spam.
- nathancahill 12y agoThread.is tried to do this a couple years ago. Gone now. Not sure there's a good use case for it. Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20121118205935/https://beta.thread.is/ http://web.archive.org/web/20121118205935/https://beta.threa... Twitter: https://twitter.com/threadhq https://twitter.com/threadhq
- zavi 12y agoThis is great. One use case: my grandma who struggled to learn how to use email can now make websites.
- mailpin 12y agoThanks! Our goal is to keep it simple. It's just like many things in life, it's always harder to decide what not to do than deciding what to do.
- daviding 12y agoNicely done. Feedback: - Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that. - A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font. - You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names). - I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?
- zachrose 12y agoPlease consider keeping the default serif font. It lends an air of humble authenticity to the service, giving the impression that it's hosted by some no-BS people who want an alternative to the glossy and boring options for social media.
- mailpin 12y agoThanks for your feedback! "Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that." We haven't worked out a formal privacy policy ... but of course, user privacy is our top priority! We won't use user emails for anything else. In fact, from the post page, you can't find your email address. "A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font." We are still improving on the UI ... We would appreciate if you tell us your preferred font :) "You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names)" We also take care of unsubscribe part if the unsubscribe url contains your email address. "I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?" Definitely there are many possibilities to explore from what we have right now. We'd like to hear users comments / critiques / suggestions first.
- daviding 12y agoJust to clarify what I meant by the 'unsubscribe' part, many newsletters (like your Costco example from the OP) contain an unsubscribe link without an email but with a unique id in the href. When clicking this you often get to a page that then lets you unsubscribe and sometimes also see who the address was subscribed too, which defeats the purpose. I'm not sure what would be the ideal solution, but you could hit it with a hammer and remove all hrefs from the content in the email DOM, or perhaps parse explicitly for unsubscribe links (harder, as they vary, a bit of NLP etc). Alternatively, just consider the page as 'not for hostiles', in that the user should only share with people who wouldn't hunt for mischief in the first place. For next steps and parsing, it really depends on if you want to store a user graph your end, i.e. do you want to also initiate the 'share' and know who is looking at the link? If you do then the features go in one direction (collaboration, conversations, actionable stuff) but if you don't want that then it's sort of a different animal (formatting, i.e. galleries, content suggestions and the like). For a font, Helvetica Neue or anything in that family is all the rage ;)
- bussiere 12y agoEmail is for me a convenient way to pass data. And client are more easy to manage or interact with emails. And one of the best is that you can keep your data with emails an decentralised it. Very nice works, the idea is pleasant i'am thinking on a private open source network. Would you mind if i use your idea ?
- bussiere 12y agoI am thinking that it could be a way to make a extended kind of mailing list. A maling list where you can publish things more easily ....
- bussiere 12y agoAnd again what please me is tahat oy decentralised the things why not make comment for a post with emails too ? Did you read this ? http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/mrprivacy.pdf http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/mrprivacy.pdf
- melvinmt 12y agoCool hidden feature: it obfuscates any email address mentioned in the post.
- Theodores 12y ago"This picture shows how we created this page:" (Checks picture...) Picture contains: "This picture shows how we created this page:" Picture of picture contains... ...there it breaks. But you were on to something recursive for a while.
- chrislusf 12y agohaha, interesting..., chicken and egg problem.
- bambax 12y agoGood! I created a similar thing last year when Posterous died; it sill exists and although it never got any traction I still use it for my blog; it's called urgeous.com and has an API that lets users use it as a service (posts can be displayed from your own domain while being hosted by Urgeous). Your positionning is certainly superior though, because 'mail2web' is simpler and more fun than 'yet another blogging platform that uses email'... I never got around to turning attachments on because I was afraid of the hosting costs; how do you plan on dealing with those?
- mailpin 12y agoThanks for your support! "I never got around to turning attachments on because I was afraid of the hosting costs; how do you plan on dealing with those?" As long as users don't delete their posts, we keep them (including attachments) there. If we are running out of storage space, we can add more machines :)
- jon2512chua 12y agoAre you guarding against malicious users who send automated emails containing large attachments?
- hngiszmo 12y ago… like sharing the latest block busters …
- mooreds 12y agoAwesome! I blogged about people sending emails with content that didn't have an associated URL recently (and how that pained my heart): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1441 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1441 And mailp.in solves that issue perfectly. If someone sends you an email that is chock full of content that should be shared, just mailpin it. One question: how long are the URL and the content preserved?
- mailpin 12y agoThanks! "One question: how long are the URL and the content preserved?" You decide. If you don't delete it yourself, it'll be there forever. And it's private. You decide who to share with. You decide whether to keep it or not. We will commit to improving mailpin, making it a robust and useful service.
- hashbanged 12y agoWhat are the restrictions on attachment sizes?
- mailpin 12y agoFor now, we really don't have any restriction on attachment size. We accpect whatever you are allowed to send for your email account. But definitely we have alerts and closely monitor to prevent something bad happens.
- bussiere 12y agoDo you plan to implement tweeter card format for the post ?
- mailpin 12y agoYes, we do.
- _asciiker_ 12y agoVery good idea, I'll use it. just a heads up though. Abusers will abuse, and it seems that you are only going to consider restrictions and security overall after it happens. Set some alerts so you at least get a warning before the server goes down.
- mailpin 12y agoThanks! Will do!
- bussiere 12y agoDo you know if google index your pages ? and how it can find all the pages or links ?
- mailpin 12y agoIf you put your link to public places like hacker news, then google will find it. If you simply create a post page and keep it to yourself or share in a closed social network (e.g., IM, facebook private group ...) that cannot be indexed by google, then you are good. That said, you decide to what degree you want to share your page.
- nickconfer 12y agoThis is not correct. With Google now having Chrome and other tools, there are many ways for Google to find out a URL exists. You may want to send a follow up email with a quick link for the user to add a noindex meta tag to the page, or even password protect it.
- mailpin 12y agoThanks! We just did a release to address this problem. Now, <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> is added for each single page.
- ChrisNorstrom 12y agoSweet! Thank you. I just used your service apply for PIEPDX Startup Incubator just a few seconds ago. I needed a quick way to create an online photo gallery and just emailed the pics to p@mailp.in. Private by default, no account needed, and easier than min.us
- bgroins 12y agoJust a heads up, you left the unsubscribe active in the sample Costo email.
- gphilip 12y agoAnd the email address to which Costco sent the email is also visible.
- teemonasty 12y agoIt must be so fun to look at the breakdown of the company or university email addresses that you are getting emails from
- socrates1998 12y agoThis is really cool!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jqm 12y ago"You email client is your editor" Should be "Your email client...."?
- techsupporter 12y agoOne request: PLEASE don't use highlighting-pops-up-text add-ins. They immediately get blocked on my end and are an annoying user experience.
- joekrill 12y agoThis is a HUGE pet-peeve of mine because I have a habit of selecting text while I'm reading. And I'm definitely not alone. I don't understand why sites continue to do this.
- pearjuice 12y ago>I don't understand why sites continue to do this. The same reason they show advertisements. By installing these plugins they get a share of affiliate income or other louchy schemes.
- mailpin 12y agoYour voice is heard. We've removed the highlighting plugin. Sorry for your inconvenience.
- Flolagale 12y agoNice! We've been working on a similar project http://jokund.com http://jokund.com You just send an email and any Cc'ed people is subscribed to your blog. Would love some feedback. By the way, we also open sourced an npm module to handle inbound emails and post them to a webhook of your choice https://github.com/Flolagale/mailin https://github.com/Flolagale/mailin
- INTPenis 12y agoDoes anyone know which library this uses to convert mails to HTML? I'm wondering because I need something for a devops project that can show spam inline in a webpage. Obviously this is dangerous because it could spread malware so what could mailp.in be using to avoid spreading malware like this?
- stevekemp 12y agoI'd be curious what your approach is to handling porn submissions, be they legal or not? (i.e. I don't see anything about reporting illegal images, like most gallery-hosting sites have.) Also how will you handle spam? Just post it regardless unless or until volume becomes excessive?
- yitchelle 12y agoGreat Idea. Can you add a time limit functions on the generated webpage? The generated webpage will be deleted after x number of days.
- mike-cardwell 12y agoSo I tested this with https://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/. I didn't get an automated response with a link. However, I noticed that somebody had viewed the email using an iPhone. So I scanned my logs to grab the referer from the callbacks and it was: http://mailp.in/dashboard/reply/*ID* http://mailp.in/dashboard/reply/*ID* Where I replaced the actual id with "ID". So I copied the ID from that referrer and visited: http://mailp.in/*ID* http://mailp.in/*ID* It seems you don't strip out quite a lot of stuff, including script tags and meta refresh tags. If you want to contact me about any of this, my details are at https://grepular.com/#contact https://grepular.com/#contact (I am the author of https://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/ if you hadn't guessed)
- mailpin 12y agoThanks for your testing! We have fixed the script / meta tag strip problem. We keep improving our code base, making sure emails are rendered correctly on web pages. We won't use user data for anything else.
- milkers 12y agoI want to see the mailp.inception on the image attached!
- ssivark 12y agoCool stuff! :-) Feedback: "The created web page is private to you." If I understand the system correctly, isn't that misleading? Once you share the link with someone, they could share it with the whole world. I.e. you share full control with every person you share the link with. Kinda like the privacy you get with email (no more) so maybe @mailpin could correct the description to reflect that.
- funkyy 12y agoImgur says exactly the same - your Images are private and its up to you if share them. I cannot imagine situation where someone shares a link and expect the content to be private any more...
- bdirgo 12y agoI know not logging in is the basic premise of your website, but I'd also like to be able to read more than just the one post I found written by that author. Rather than search his tweets, and facebook posts, and any emails he's ever sent me for a mailp.in link. Is there a way you can have sub-domains such as [username].mailp.in/[post address] Perhaps the username is a hash of the email address to keep the privacy of the user. Not a deal-breaker but it'd be nice.
- sudheendrach 12y agoThis is bad https://www.google.co.in/search?q=site%3Amailp.in https://www.google.co.in/search?q=site%3Amailp.in
- mailpin 12y agoThanks for pointing this out. All these google indexes are gone.
- rpgmaker 12y agoThis passed the instapaper test, thanks!